This posting is counterintuitive, but I have found a way to get more leads from this website. Here is the story:

On all the services pages, we would encourage people to email or to phone. We made it very clear that we prefer email for first contact. This was in order to do some triage, and not spend half-an-hour on the phone with someone who will never be a client. Also, once on the phone, a person is inclined to ask a hundred questions, whereas by email they are more likley to confine themselves to those questions that are actually relevant.

I estimate that at least 80% of queries would come in by email, but still too many by phone. Furthermore, the email queries often contained very little information, so there was still a bit of back and forth before we could assess what to do with each query.

So we replaced our message with a contact form on each page. Our phone number and email address are still easy to find on our contact page, but we are now prompting people to contact us using a form. The form contains all the basic information we need to understand a potential client’s project. The key is to customize each form for the specific type of project.

We loaded the forms to the pages, and two things happened. First, the suspected. In several days, there have been no phone calls. In several days, there have been no emails. In the several days there have been more total queries. Yes, the forms are helping drive leads. I would have though it would be the opposite, since we are forcing people to think a little about their project before contacting us (not a bad thing, mind you, but something I would thing that would act as a small barrier). I suspect that by giving people an indication of what information we need and making it easy for them to provide it without writing from scratch, we are increasing our leads.

Will that increase our revenue, our actual conversions? Too early to tell. But I sure hope so!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 1:41 pm and is filed under clients, website conversion, website updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.